rawdogging life

Films about people with no safety net: no savings, no backup, nobody to call, and no drink strong enough to take the edge off. Some of them cut the net down themselves, while the rest were simply unlucky.

The self-inflicted ones choose the hard way. Christopher McCandless cuts his own net down in Into the Wild, donating his entire $24,000 savings, abandoning his possessions, and hitchhiking to Alaska to live off the land. Timothy Treadwell goes even further in Grizzly Man, spending his summers living among wild grizzlies in a pitch-black haze of idealism. In Cool Hand Luke, Luke Jackson refuses to bow to the sadistic warden or the chain-gang hierarchy on a Florida prison farm, taking beating after beating just to prove he cannot be broken.

The rest are simply unlucky. Antonio finally lands a poster-hanging job in post-war Rome in Bicycle Thieves, only for his bicycle to be stolen on day one. Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly in Winter's Bone faces the loss of her family home after her father skips bail, forcing her into the terrifying Ozark underworld to track him down. Chuck Noland's plane crashes at sea in Cast Away, leaving him stranded on a barren island as the sole survivor. In All Is Lost, an unnamed sailor wakes to a shipping container punctured through his yacht's hull, leaving his radio dead and navigation fried. The universe pulls no punches here, and not a single film skips the hard part.